Winners of the 2016 Write Awards

A huge thank you to all of you who attended the 2016 Write Awards last night. We were thrilled to see such a packed event with so many people passionate about good media representation about violence against women. Our fantastic compere Talat Yaqoob held the evening together, reminding us that while the Write Awards may only be an annual event, we can hold our media accountable all year round. We would like to give thanks to our speaker Cabinet Secretary Angela Constance and our MSP sponsor Christina McKelvie; it is wonderful to have MSPs who are actively and vocally challenging the narrative that says violence against women is ever acceptable and we are glad to have their support. Huge thanks as well to our wonderful panel of judges and of course all the writers who entered this year’s competition.

We’ll be posting more about the awards in the coming weeks, so please keep an eye out – for now please enjoy the winners of this year’s awards.

Rather than award “worst article” or wooden spoon to a particular article, the organisers have decided to award this year’s Wooden Spoon to a theme. This recognises the shortcomings of representation as a whole, rather than singling out one individual journalist.

This year, the Wooden Spoon was awarded to the them of ‘invisible women’. Namely, the media’s tendency to neglect to mention the woman in cases of a family killing and instead focus the majority of coverage on the perpetrator. This theme was motivated by two instances of women being killed by their partner; Claire Hart in Spalding, England and Clodagh Hawe in County Cavan, Ireland. In both instances the husband killed their wife, children and then themselves.

The Wooden Spoon award was presented by Kirsty Strickland and we will be publishing a transcript of her presentation before Christmas.